Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) handle the authentication tasks of applications/services on the Linux system. In other words, it allows us to configure how applications use authentication to verify the identity of a user.

In this article, we are mainly dealing with the configuration file format. The PAM configuration files are located under the directory /etc/pam.d/ which describes the authentication procedure for an application. Each file in this directory has the same name as the application for which the module provides authentication. /etc/pam.conf was the configuration file used in earlier versions of PAM and is now deprecated. We can create or add new PAM modules at any time and the programs can immediately use these newly created module and password method without being recompiled.Continue reading…

CloudLinux is one of the widely used Operating System now-a-days due to the high level stability and advanced server security it provides, which makes it the first preference to hosting providers, especially in shared hosting environment.

LVE (Lightweight Virtual Environment) is a kernel level technology developed by the CloudLinux team. It is lightweight and transparent. The goal of LVE is to make sure that no single website can bring down your web server.

The kernel makes sure that all LVEs get fair share of the server’s resources, and that no customer can use more than the limits set for that customer.Continue reading…

The Network File System (NFS) was originally developed by SUN Micro-systems that allows communications between Linux/Unix systems. It allows you to mount your local file systems over a network and remote hosts or clients to interact with them as they are mounted locally on the same system.

Benefits

>> Central Data Management.
>> Allows local access to remote files transparently.
>> Very good for local or reliable connections

Important NFS configuration file

/etc/exports : All files and directories which need to be exported are defined in this which is located in server.

Here we are going to share the /home directory in the server using NFS. To share this we need to add this directory to be shared and the details of how it is shared in /etc/exports file.

vi /etc/exports

Here we are going to add the below line in the above file

/home 192.168.0.xx(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)

rw : This allows the client to read and write in the shared directory
sync : Sync confirms requests to the shared directory only once the changes have been committed.
no_root_squash : This allows /home accessed as root.
no_subtree_check : This option prevents the subtree checking. When a shared directory is the subdirectory of a larger filesystem, nfs performs scans of every directory above it, in order to verify its permissions and details. Disabling the subtree check may increase the reliability of NFS, but reduce security.

Once you entered the above entry, we need to export them by using below command.

exportfs -a

Note : We need to run this command for every update we make in the /etc/exports file.

exportfs -r

Client

yum install nfs-utils nfs-utils-lib

Then we need to create a directory in client system where we want to mount NFS shares. For e.g.: